The OptIPuter is a computing paradigm in which dynamically controllable optical networks become the system bus that connects cluster computers as if they were giant peripherals in a planetary-scale computer. (The IP in OptIPuter refers to the fact that it uses Internet Protocol as the standard for data transmission.) Supported by National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research (ITR) program, the OptIPuter aims to deliver the middleware and end-user software that will allow geoscientists and bioscientists to work with enormous data-sets in real-time over thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable that are part of an emerging Lambda Grid that connects sites like TRECC, NCSA, UCSD, and EVL at UIC.

EVL is now partnering with TRECC to deploy new visualization and other user interface technologies at the TRECC facility in West Chicago. It's a collaboration that's been going on for three years now and that began with the installation of the Continuum at TRECC in 2001. "The Continuum is really the prototype for OptIPuter collaboration environments," says Jason Leigh of EVL, who currently leads the project to make TRECC an OptIPuter node. "In other words, they should be extremely display-rich environments, with the ability to wallpaper a high-definition video stream and high-resolution visualization content, and to be able to work collaboratively with this data over distance."

The result of this experiment was the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) -- the software that will drive the "next generation" of the Continuum. Imagine an entire room covered in thin displays (which Leigh predicts will someday be cheap enough to be used as wallpaper) and driven by an extremely high-speed network. "You're going to stop treating information on the wall like you would on your regular desktop computer," says Leigh. "The traditional notion of
using a keyboard and a mouse doesn't quite work very well, because the cursor is so small that it will disappear into the wall." Instead, Leigh suggests, people will walk up to the wall and interact with it as if it were simply an office wall -- but one as useful and important as a computer desktop. "Think about how you organize your office-some people will put up posters, some people will tape up bits of paper with notes on them, people will have little corkboards where they stick bits of notes and posters and images, potentially. This is exactly the same thing, except that we're going to make it digital and hence provide greater access to dynamic information. People already take advantage of wall space for putting up information. We're just making it digital so that it's even more flexible." Leigh further envisions that as users move from one room to another, all the information in that room will be able to move with them, seamlessly.

The OptIPuter Gets Real

Last week, the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they would collaborate to decipher the genetic code of the world's marine microbiological communities. This project, the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA), will use the OptIPuter model developed at Calit2 as the architecture for its omputational resources.

Named for its use of Optical networking, Internet Protocol, computer storage, processing and visualization technologies, the OptIPuter is an infrastructure that links computational resources over optical networks using the IP communication mechanism. The OptIPuter's central architectural element is optical networks, not computers. The goal of this architecture is to enable researchers who are generating large volumes of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from distributed sites.

"What is exciting about this is that it's taking both frontier science and combining it with frontier cyberinfrastructure," said Smarr. Larry Smarr, as one of the luminaries in the field, is well known for his contributions to the information technology community, from his early involvement in the original Mosaic web browser at NCSA to his current work as the founding director of Calit2. David Kingsbury, the science program officer at the Moore foundation, was well-aware of Smarr's work.

Beside basic scientific discovery, there are several of potential applications for metagenomic research. According to Smarr, there are a number of companies that are already looking at marine microorganisms for new drugs, the way they have with soil-based microorganisms. There are also exciting biofuel applications that are being considered, for example the production of hydrogen and ethanol as fuel sources from microbial metabolism.

Smarr also projects how the technology can be applied directly to other microbial ecosystems. For example, the microorganisms inside of the large intestines were recently shotgun sequenced by Stanford researchers. Soil microorganisms, the source of many drugs, such as penicillin, are another likely target for metagenomics. Even airborne
dust particles can be biologically active and are currently being studied in relation to the mold problem caused by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The OptIPuter model is based on the ability of optical networks to move data around at speeds of tens of gigabits per second over dedicated lambdas. Significantly, the increases in optical network bandwidth and storage capacity are outstripping the increases in CPU performance. As a result, "Moore's Law" is not driving information technology the way it used to (ironic when you consider that Gordon Moore, the originator of "Moore's Law," is now funding this project
through his Foundation).

The OptIPuter exploits the enormous bandwidth of fiber optic networks to link distributed computer and storage resources. With the recent expansion of National LambdaRail as the optical backbone for cross-country connectivity, Smarr believes we're entering a critical stage for technological change.

"This is a one-in-twenty-year transition point," said Smarr, "going back to 1985, when the NSF built the first backbone for the shared Internet. Now National LambdaRail has built the first backbone for the unshared Internet. At present, there are about two dozen state and regional optical networks that are interconnecting to National LambdaRail. The campuses are beginning to put fiber optics into their actual laboratories, and connecting these to the state and regional optical networks which are then connected to National LambdaRail."

"So that was the fundamental insight that led us to work on these optical networks. It wasn't that optical networks were cool and we were looking for something to do with them. It was that the scientific community had decided on Linux clusters as their standard and they're natural need for a wide area network was clearly in the gigabits and tens of gigabits per second range. So we looked around for a technology that could provide this and found that the telecom industry had evolved to the point where the natural data flow on their individual lambdas was 10 gigabits per second."

The Science Server

As part of the CAMERA project, Calit2 will partner with UCSD's SDSC to develop the science data server complex, which couples the Calit2 and SDSC middleware, compute, and storage capabilities with the TeraGrid computing facility in a Service Oriented Architecture. This will enable computing resources to be applied to a range of tools to tackle the computationally intense questions derived from the metagenomic data collection.

"This is the first science data server that has been architected to direct-connect to your local cluster through the National LambdaRail. What we've done with this server is make it the first TeraGrid appliance. In other words, we're linking directly into the TeraGrid lambdas from our science server. So as a user, when you connect to the science server, it now appears to be just an extension of your local cluster. Over the next few years the TeraGrid will expand to tens of thousand of processors, so you'll get orders of magnitude increases in power by plugging into the TeraGrid. It should all appear as if it's in your laboratory. And that's the vision!"